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WILKES-BARRE - Judge John M. Cleland arrived for work in Luzerne County in November 2009, nine months after federal prosecutors revealed the multimillion-dollar kickback scheme that propelled the county's juvenile court into punitive overdrive. Former judges Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. and Michael T. Conahan, the prosecutors said, had collected $2.8 million from a developer and an attorney to send young defendants to a pair of for-profit juvenile detention centers they built.

The scheme became known as "Kids for Cash," and a documentary by that name that opened over the weekend at theaters in Northeast Pennsylvania chronicles those dark days of injustice through interviews with the former judges, the juveniles they banished to the for-profit centers and the parents and advocates who questioned the terse hearings and long detentions.

Judge Cleland's role, as the chairman of a state commission empaneled to investigate the scheme and close the gaps Mr. Ciavarella and Mr. Conahan exploited in the system, was not included in the film's narrative. For two days in November 2009, Judge Cleland and a panel of attorneys, officials and juvenile justice experts, heard from juveniles and parents who experienced juvenile court under Mr. Ciavarella's iron-fisted rule. They met again in Luzerne County for two more days in December 2009 and grilled prosecutors and court officials, and met several more times in Harrisburg.

68-page report

The panel, the Interbranch Commission on Juvenile Justice, issued a 68-page report on its findings and made more than 40 recommendations, including attorneys for every juvenile defendant, an on-the-record recitation of the youth's rights and a severe limitation on shackling. None of those was explored in the film, either.

"We had 44 recommendations and essentially all of those have been enacted in one way or another," Judge Cleland said, reciting several of the changes to state law and rules of judicial conduct. "Parents in the movie talked about the horror of seeing their kids shackled. That doesn't happen anymore, except where there's a real danger."

Judge Cleland, a McKean County senior judge and former member of the state Superior Court, said he understood the reforms were not a focus of the film, which he described as "emotionally wrenching" and a "throwback" to the hearings, which were held in a ballroom at the East Mountain Inn in Plains Twp. normally used for celebrations.

Judge Cleland, who oversaw another legal drama as the judge in the June 2012 child-sex abuse trial of Jerry Sandusky, saw "Kids for Cash" at a screening for juvenile justice officials last week in Harrisburg and said he was struck, as he was at the hearings, by the reluctance of attorneys, school officials, probation officers and others to report Mr. Ciavarella or question his methods.

"I think the important takeaway is that we all have a stake in our children," Judge Cleland said. "It's not just our children. It's our neighbor's children. The community has a responsibility to care for children."

Rushed through system

Mr. Ciavarella removed himself from the juvenile bench in May 2008, after the Juvenile Law Center, a Philadelphia-based advocacy group accused him of rushing hundreds of young defendants through the system without properly apprising them of their rights to an attorney.

Under Mr. Ciavarella, 49.1 percent of the 1,113 juveniles who passed through Luzerne County Court in 2005 and 2006 had an attorney - nearly half the statewide rate of 95 percent. The rest waived their right to an attorney.

At the time, few beside Mr. Ciavarella, Mr. Conahan and the investigators closing in on them knew of the $2.8 million in payoffs they received from the developer, Robert K. Mericle, and the one-time co-owner of the for-profit facilities, attorney Robert J. Powell. The initial wave of outrage, from parents, youth and the advocates at the Juvenile Law Center, hit at Mr. Ciavarella's wanton abuse of the system.

"The money issue aside, that's bad enough. That's terrible," Judge Cleland said. "But even if Ciavarella is right and said I never placed a kid for money, he still placed kids for all the wrong reasons."

A jury convicted Mr. Ciavarella in February 2011 on 12 of 27 counts, including racketeering and conspiracy. He is serving a 28-year prison sentence. Mr. Conahan pleaded guilty in July 2010 to a racketeering charge. He is serving a 17½-year prison sentence.

Since Mr. Ciavarella stepped aside from juvenile court (he remained in adult court until prosecutors charged him in the kids-for-cash scheme in January 2009), no youth has appeared in Luzerne County Court without an attorney, according to President Judge Thomas F. Burke Jr.

Mr. Ciavarella's departure and the reforms pushed by Judge Cleland's group also had a stark impact on the number of delinquency dispositions - the juvenile court equivalent of a conviction in adult court - and out-of-home placements in Luzerne County.

In 2008, with Mr. Ciavarella on the juvenile bench for just under five months, 921 cases resulted in a delinquency finding. The number of delinquencies fell to 727 in 2009, Judge David W. Lupas' first full year in juvenile court, and to 542 in 2012, the last year for which statistics are available. The number of out-of-home placements fell to 94 in 2012 from 212 in 2008.

Statewide, delinquency dispositions fell by 29 percent between 2008 and 2012 - from 43,754 in 2008 to 31,079 in 2012 - and out-of-home placements dropped by 30.6 percent, from 7,444 to 5,167.

Contact the writerL msisak@citizensvoice.com, @cvmikesisak

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